Hillary Clinton’s campaign has begun fundraising off the scrutiny of her financial ties, urging supporters in a Friday e-mail to “show you’ve got Hillary’s back” in the face of “baseless attacks.”
In the message, campaign Chairman John Podesta asks Clinton backers to rally around their candidate as “a former Republican operative with ties to a Koch-funded organization … uses allegations and conspiracy theories to stitch together a false narrative about Hillary without producing a single shred of evidence.”
It’s the first Clinton fundraising e-mail to reference the book Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer, and also includes two of the same talking points sent to Clinton allies earlier this week: summaries of stories debunking some of the book’s claims, published by Time and Yahoo News.
“We're only two weeks into the election and we're already up against these baseless attacks,” Podesta writes. “If we don't fight back now, we send a signal to our opponents that we'll shrivel in the face of whatever will follow.”
He adds: “This is an important moment in this campaign.”
In a sign of the Clinton team’s reliance on the same kind of data practices that the Obama campaign used, the e-mail was sent out with at least two distinct subject lines: “There’s just no evidence” and “Have Hillary’s back against these baseless attacks.”